On a balmy afternoon in a garden in east London, a scene of bee carnage is playing out on the table in front of me. A dozen drones and worker bees, their wings worn ragged, crawl lethargically across the table and drop off the end. "Oh look, it's dead," says Philip Schilds. He picks up a bee that has just expired on the table in front of us, puts it down and carries on talking. Schilds is 14 and one of the UK's youngest beekeepers. He and his stepfather Ian keep eight hives on the roof of their house in Hackney, and the three harvests a year can produce up to 500lb (225kg) of honey.

After the first harvest, Schilds says he ate so much of the honey that it put him off for life. "I only have it in tea now," he says. They sell the rest of their honey, viscous and golden, in local shops and markets, and form part of a growing community of urban beekeepers. "They're very important," says Ivor Davis, president of the British Beekeeping Association. "Plants in urban areas tend to flower for longer periods than in rural areas, where agricultural crops come out in a big rush and then are gone. The variety of plants in urban areas - in gardens, parks, railway embankments - means the honey has a more interesting flavour than if the bees had just been getting honey from fields of oil-seed rape. We'd like to see more urban beekeepers."

Schilds started keeping bees when he was nine, when his stepfather got a hive. "I was always interested in insects," he says, "and there is something cool about a bee - it's like a flying scorpion." He says he thinks he has been stung by them "around 50 times. The worst was when I was stung 12 times at once. That was before I learned you had to tuck your trousers into your socks. They were all up to my knees inside my trousers. I climbed down from the roof and had to comb my leg with this big brush to get them off."

Did the experience not deter him? "No. You remember that it hurt but you don't care. The first time I got stung on my finger. It meant I couldn't write properly, which got me out of homework - but only for a week." He goes up on the roof every couple of weeks to check on the hives.

When Schilds was 11, he was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a condition on the autistic spectrum. People with Asperger's tend to have problems with social interaction, but can also have a very high IQ and remember a huge amount of detailed information. Schilds seems to have no problem with social skills - he is the most chatty and engaging teenager I've met - but Asperger's could explain why he is incredibly bright, and has stored a huge amount of information about bees.

Not all bees sting, I learn. "Drones don't," says Schilds. They just hang around the hive? "And eat stuff, yes. They have sex and die, which doesn't seem to be too bad a life. Queen bees go through a 'menopause' and stop breeding. Drones are all male because they're basically just breeders, and the workers are all female. From my bedroom I can look across the roof and watch them. When they swarm, it looks like a big, dark cloud, like in those cartoons when someone disturbs a beehive and you get this big cannonball of bees chasing after them."